Loretta left after supper. She had originally planned to show the video to Greg that night, but the whole experience left her feeling shaken in a way she didn’t know how to describe. 

Scientists weren’t immune to superstition. Some actually became more willing to believe in the supernatural the more they learned about how the world worked. What separated them from the layperson, by and large, was that they didn’t attempt to use religion, faith, or mysticism to fill in gaps that science hadn’t yet explained. 

Loretta was no exception to this rule. She could believe that the universe was a random accident, a roll of the dice that just so happened to create the right conditions for atoms to form molecules, and for molecules to form life. In her eyes, that wasn’t a matter of faith. It was the only logical option presented by the facts. 

But when it came to the matter of souls, she was a little less certain. 

She knew, intellectually, that the whole of her being could be digitized, encoded, and sent back in time. The brain was a machine and, however complicated a machine it might be, machines could be understood. They could be replicated. The science was terribly unromantic, but it was undoubtedly correct. She had reaped the benefits of it several times. 

It was equally true, and equally unromantic, that the strong affinity she felt for Greg was likely the result of basic animal chemistry. They were, simply put, strongly compatible. His genes would produce strong offspring. He was a capable and competent provider, not that she really cared about that part. As far as she was concerned, that was vestigial caveman nonsense. She didn’t need a man to provide for her, however much his strong arms and broad shoulders made her feel weak at the knees. 

It wasn’t hard to see why Loretta-4 had fallen for him, once she’d given him the chance. The science was there. The science said they were compatible, and their bodies largely agreed. 

So, with that in mind, why did the word “soulmate” keep rising to the surface of it?

If there was such a thing as a soul, the inimitable spark of life that separated humans from the beasts, Project Legacy had yet to discover concrete evidence. They couldn’t disprove the idea, any more than they could prove or disprove the existence of a god or gods, but that wasn’t exactly saying a whole lot. It just meant that the whole idea was unscientific. 

Unscientific, but undoubtedly romantic. 

There were some elements of the data transfer process that were poorly understood, to be sure. In theory, data loss rates should be somewhere around 10-20000. The margin for error was so impossibly low as to be the next best thing to perfect. The efficiency was staggering. 

And yet, something had changed, at least for Loretta. She wasn’t the same Loretta that had been transferred at the end of loop 3. 

Had Loretta-4 been able to make a backup, that would have easily explained the discrepancy. Once the master copy of the brain had been made, a process that involved slicing it into impossibly thin wafers and scanning it with an electron microscope, updating it simply required a powerful and precise MRI machine. The process was taxing on the body, so most researchers only made backups once every decade or so, but something had prevented Loretta-4 from making hers. 

In theory, nothing of Loretta-4 should have made it into the newly decanted Loretta-5. She should have been just as bitter, just as angry, just as hurt, and just as hurtful, as she had been at the end of her last life. She could remember, in excruciating detail, the rage she felt all throughout loop 3, as her colleagues, even Harriet, turned on her, how they treated her like a pariah for forcing a final time loop. She had turned out to be right, in the end, but that only made things worse. Hell, she’d gone out of her way to encrypt her work data so they had to bring her back for the next loop, or they might not have bothered at all. 

By all rights, she should have awoken in Salt Lake City with a chip on her shoulder. But, she didn’t. Something had changed between dying as Loretta-3 and awakening as Loretta-5. And the only answer that made sense, the only one she could possibly imagine, was six foot five and freckled. 

But, that was impossible. Just as impossible as the idea that someone altered her personality through data manipulation. Every experiment into that had failed in spectacular fashion. Make changes to the data and the host brain would reject it outright. It was the mental equivalent of a body rejecting an organ transplant. Even minor changes to the psyche could trigger a rejection. 

And yet, here she was, and the only answer she could think of was that her soul remembered the time it spent with Greg. 

Unscientific, but wonderfully, achingly romantic. 

Her inner scientist wanted to hare off on a chase to hunt down other loopers, to see if any one of them had a hitherto yet undiscovered soulmate. The only way to prove or disprove her hypothesis was to find more data points. But, even as she considered the idea, she knew it was impossible. 

Logically speaking, if souls were real, the chances of someone actually finding the one soul they were meant to be with during their lifetime were staggeringly low. It took her four lifetimes to find Greg, and not counting the discarded timelines, there was something like 110 billion humans who ever existed. Even quantum physicists got antsy when you started talking about odds like that. 

“God, I’m such an idiot,” she breathed, once she was safely behind her apartment’s door. 

“Oh, I take it you went to see Greg?” Harriet asked. 

“Yeah,” Loretta replied, miserable. “I saw Greg.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you had a nasty case of heartache,” Harriet sighed. 

The two didn’t share an apartment, not officially. Rank hath its privileges, and they were both senior researchers. But, they had been married, once upon a time, and whatever else might have happened, they found comfort in each other’s presence once more. They spent about half their free time with each other, usually watching old movies. 

“Is that what it is? Here I was thinking it was indigestion,” Loretta said. 

“I take it he fed you?”

“The man can cook, I’ll give him that,” Loretta said. 

She joined Harriet on the couch and rested her head on the shorter woman’s shoulder. 

“Alright, spill,” Harriet ordered. “And don’t leave out the juicy details. I need data.”